The Solicitor General, Tushar Mehta, on Friday, during a high-profile hearing at the Karnataka High Court, brought out the dangers of anonymous content on the Internet. In order to prove the penetrability of misinformation in digital media, he disclosed that his office had once created an imaginary profile on X (previously Twitter) carrying the name Supreme Court of Karnataka.
Before Justice M Nagaprasanna, Mehta gave the explanation that the account appeared with the image of the Supreme Court and an official-sounding handle. Even though this was a completely fake profile, X was confirmed, which once again shows that the platform is vulnerable to manipulation. The protest was to coincide with a court hearing over a legal dispute by X Corp regarding the Indian government’s Sahyog portal, a central system to transact requests to remove content.
It goes to show how an account can be established so easily in the name of a constitutional authority, and this is why Mehta cautioned about the possible dangers that unregulated and anonymous content in social media could cause. Interestingly, the account was suspended as senior court advocate KG Raghavan representing X Corp in the court record noted, and this elicited amusement in the court.
Raghavan raised a doubt on whether the government was right in doing this by creating a phony account and showing it in the court without producing the same formally on the record. Mehta countered by explaining that the account was simply a mere representation that was meant to be demonstrative. There were no publications under the handle.
In addition to the example, Mehta expressed serious concerns about how there is no accountability on platforms such as X. He then posed the question, in case a user posts illegal material and is anonymous, who does the victim sue? Mehta was also critical of X Corp, which did not cooperate with the Sahyog portal when other middlemen were cooperating. He justified the portal as a legal, administrative process that is unbinding and has no punishment.
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